Century-Old Colorado Ranch
Feeling Squeezed By Change

By David Bowser

CRESTED BUTTE, Colo. — It's 22 degrees in mid-October as Bill Trampe pulls away from the place his grandfather homesteaded a century ago. Up in the high country, it's really cold.

Trampe usually brings his cattle down off the mountain grazing permit the first of October, but a wet August and rainy September delayed cutting the hay which will get him through the winter here where there are only about 50 frost-free days a year.

As Trampe pulls his horse trailer up the valley, he surveys the country around him. When he was a kid growing up here between Almont and Crested Butte, there were 14 ranches along the valley. Now there is Trampe's ranch and two others.

"My granddad came here at the turn of the century," Trampe says.

Henry Trampe came in the late 1890s as a potato farmer, not a rancher. He sold potatoes to the miners at Crested Butte. Trampe's father, Sheldon Trampe, didn't want to farm and moved into the livestock business.

"This isn't the best country in the world to be farming in," Trampe notes. "It is good cattle country."

There have been other changes over the years, particularly grazing in a county which is 84 percent publicly owned.

In the 1950s, the Forest Service began to impose restrictions and enforce cutbacks in grazing numbers, Trampe says. They broke the big grazing pool into three or four smaller pools.

"I can remember as a little kid when we got in a smaller pool and took a pretty sizable reduction in the early 1950s," Trampe says. "We continue to operate that way. My dad recognized that we could not be quite so dependent upon federal lands, so he invested in private ground. We made up the difference by going private."

By the early 1980s, only Trampe and a neighboring ranch were in the grazing pools.

The pools were divided then, the neighbors taking Red Mountain between Gunnison and Crested Butte, and Trampe taking the area around the all but deserted mining town of Gothic.

"That allowed both operations to really start intensifying the grazing on the federal land," Trampe says.

That led to short duration grazing in general areas, then moving on so pastures and meadows could rest and recover. It also led to a lot of water development.

"We were able to put our own dollars out there and benefit from our own dollars and not have to squabble about who's going to pay for what like you do in range pools lots of times," Trampe says.

For the most part there's little problem with water here, although there's an ongoing battle to keep metropolitan areas like Denver from taking water out of the basin.

This year has been wet, particularly the last couple of months. Last year water was less plentiful, as much of the country to the south suffered from a severe drouth.

"Our summer grass in this country was short, but we did okay," Trampe says. "It probably affected our hay crop more than anything."

They never have a total drouth, he claims, but it can get dry.

"It'll get awful damn dry," Trampe insists, "but we'll always have some hay to cut."

And they will always have some grass up on the mountains to graze, he says. The grasses on the mountains and along the East and Slate rivers offer a good cross-section of vegetation.

"We are introducing some alfalfa down home," Trampe says. "We're trying to increase the legume content and get away from nitrogen fertilization and increase the nutritional value of the hay."

Where once ranch horses dotted the pastures along Colorado Highway 135, the horses now belong to outfitters or resorts. Cows and calves share meadows with metallic sculptures of knights and dragons. Barns have been replaced with condos and vacation homes.

Above Mt. Crested Butte, cattle trails intertwine with mountain bike trails.

After graduating from Gunnison High School in 1964, Trampe went to Colorado State University for three years. His college career ended when his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and Trampe returned home to take over the family ranching operation.

"I've been back here since the spring of 1967," Trampe says.

But the landscape has changed in Gunnison County. Thirteen thousand acres of ranchland here were sold for development in the last two years. Ranches have become 35-acre ranchettes selling for prices that cannot be sustained by livestock operations. Now it is ranchers like Trampe who run the risk of becoming an endangered species.

"I think it's this way everywhere," Trampe says. "Some places are a little worse than others, but this growth and conversion of ag land is occurring everywhere. To me that's a big issue. It should be a big issue in the national scope of things."

About 1700 acres of agricultural land are taken out of production in Colorado every week.

"That's kind of frightening to me," Trampe says.

The lanky rancher sees a food crisis in the future much like the oil crisis of the 1970s.

"But the repercussions will be much greater because the American consumers are not going to take a hungry stomach as well as they took an empty gas tank," he says. "By then it's going to be too late because we're not going to be able to re-convert the asphalt and concrete back to ag land. That will be the end of America's dominance.

"We've lived on agriculture's back for a long, long time as a nation without fully recognizing what agriculture produces for this country in a lot of different ways. I'm just making an effort to do my fair part in trying to keep agriculture viable."

That means running 1000 mother cows in a region that has experienced a population growth rate of 15 percent, 2.5 times the national average, since the beginning of the decade.

"These cows are largely Red Angus-Hereford crosses," Trampe says, surveying the cattle brought down from the Gothic grazing permit. "We're using Salers bulls on them or Leachman composites, Rangemaker composites."

He also maintains a herd of Hereford cows down the valley for replacements in his crossbreeding program.

Trampe's cows begin calving about March 20, his heifers about two to three weeks before that.

"Around the first week of May," Trampe says, "we start moving into the Jacks Cabin country, which is 10 miles north of where we live."

From May 20 to June 10, they move to the Jarvis place, named for the family from whom Trampe's father bought it, at the base of Crested Butte, still on deeded ground. Between the first and 10th of July, they go on the federal grazing permits.

"We rotate around on those permits, never returning to the same country, always going to something new," Trampe says. "The first week of October, we come back in. We’ll start weaning and pulling the calves out of this country the last few days in October and the first few days in November. The cows will stay in this country until we either run out of feed or get snowed out."

The cattle then go back to meadow regrowth.

"They'll stay on the meadows for two to three weeks, maybe as much as a month, depending upon the weather," Trampe says.

Then they trail the cows down the highway back to Jacks Cabin.

"It's the only trailing we do anymore," Trampe says. "We spend the winter there. We truck out of there back to home base around the first of March, ready for calving."

In the fall, Trampe will pull most of his big calves and put them in a warm-up yard, then move them in February. They will go into the backgrounding yard weighing about 600 pounds and weigh 800 to 850 pounds coming out.

"They're moved in late February or early March, steers and heifers," Trampe says. "The English cross cattle, cull terminal cross cattle and the straight Hereford and straight Red Angus, we go to grass. We keep them in the valley down home there on a wintering program and try to get a pound a day on them.

"We'll go to grass with them next spring, late May, weighing 650 to 700 pounds and come off with them weighing 900 to 950 pounds in September. We sell them off the grass."

It's all private treaty, he says. Trampe's fed out some of his cattle, but it's not a common practice.

Amid the bawling of the cattle that have been gathered at the Jarvis pens, the sounds of construction can be heard over the hill at Crested Butte. But in a world in which warring factions seem more polarized than ever, this pocket of Colorado has tried to reach agreement on land use and preservation.

The ranchers, environmentalists and developers don't always agree, but they do talk.

"You accomplish nothing until you're willing to talk," Trampe says. "I mean that very sincerely. It doesn't matter which side of the table is doing the complaining, you don't accomplish anything until you at least listen to the other guy with an open enough mind to see where they're coming from."

Consequently, one of the solutions they have tentatively reached includes ranchers selling development rights rather than their property, and opening conservation rights-of-way that will be placed in permanent trust.

"The people I really work with the most I don't consider environmentalists," Trampe says. "I just consider them good, sound citizens of Gunnison County. Maybe they came from the environmental community and I came from a ranching community, but with this land preservation effort, we've got people that come from the development community, too. That's a really strange mix. People said we could never do it."

He told a meeting on grazing reform here several years ago that they had to put together a coalition involving the development community and the real estate businesses.

"Everybody laughed at me, including my cohorts here locally," Trampe remembers. "They thought I was plumb nuts."

But it is happening, and there is dialogue.

"You've got to make that development community recognize the fact that there is a benefit to leaving some of this country open and uncarved," Trampe says.

Despite the pressures of growing population and development, Trampe still expects to spend the rest of his days here.

"I thoroughly enjoy where I am, " Trampe says, looking up at the mountain vistas. "That's a part of it. I see it, and I don't take it for granted. Maybe I used to, but I don't anymore. I'm seeing too many roads and too many condos, too many bicycle trails to not appreciate it. I remember what it used to be. My dad used to rent the ground over here where this ski area is. It was a ranch then. As a kid, I can remember driving cows up the hill over here and taking them over to that ranch and grazing them for the summer, then bringing them back in here."

A family that used to live where a hotel now stands would come over and help vaccinate calves all day.

"I spent half of my life learning how to ranch here," Trampe says. "I don't want to go somewhere else and have to re-learn."